[e2e] lifetime record of a UDP packet ?

[Matt Mathis]

The old FDDI interfaces would do this too.  I once unplugged a cable, went
to lunch and then captured the ~hour old packet, just to prove a point (I
think this was in about 1990).  I bet the actual record matches the time to
repair for some optical device...

Since you can construct any number that you have the patience for, it isn't
really a very interesting record.   "Accidentally captured in a production
network" is a bit interesting.

Thanks,
--MM--
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On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 8:19 AM, Jon Crowcroft <jon.crowcroft at cl.cam.ac.uk>
wrote:

> cool - nearest i recall was a bug in SIMPs which lost buffers and they had
> a sort of inverse garbage collector that ran every 18 seconds (I think)
> which looked at the heap of unallocated stuff and decided if things had got
> there that shouldn't be and put them back in the right
> thread/task/processes' pool, so every now and then, instead of taking
> .72sec RTT (geo-synch orbit satellite up and down and up and down), took
> nearly 19 seconds....
>
> purist might say the TTL should have been decremented 18, but a meta-purist
> might say "ah, but a SIMP isn't an IP router, so its layer 2 only", and a
> post MPLS Person (20 years too late) would argue layer 2 devices should
> decrement TTL too, to prevent loops and to bound the max seg lifetime in
> the net so TCPs duplicate detection still operates correctly etc etc
>
> i suppose this was around 1981?
>
> On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 2:18 PM, Olav Kvittem <olav.kvittem at uninett.no>
> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > Not very serious - just for old-timer entertainment ;-)
> >
> > I was doing a UDP   measurement stream with timestamped and sequence
> > marked packets.
> >
> > On analyzing the stream I found a packet arriving 6737 seconds late -
> > i.e. 1 hour 52 minutes.
> >
> > Is that oldest packet seen on The Internet or not ?-)
> >
> > Did it beat the trip time of the IP over Avian Carriers experiment ?-).
> >
> > I had naively set my reordering window to 10 seconds..
> >
> >
> > It turned out that there was maintenance on an optical link on the path,
> > so the link was taken down
> >
> > at the exact time of this event.
> >
> > Rerouting happened in about 50ms of the link going down and that was
> fine.
> >
> >
> > So where did the packet spend the time ?
> >
> > An explanation might be that the packet was residing  in an output
> > buffer in the router in front of the  link
> >
> > until it was up again and then sent on the link!
> >
> >
> > I rule out local clock errors on the measurement devices, as these are
> > NTP-controlled Linux systems and that it also happened to an
> >
> > independent pair of measurement nodes thorough the same router.
> >
> >
> > So this looks like a router bug to me - ref RFC 1918 below.
> >
> > Accordingly the maximum lifetime with initial TTL 64 should be 64
> seconds.
> >
> > I would guess that the router should be flushing the queue at some point
> > during the event.
> >
> > However the router is old and out of support so we are not reporting it.
> >
> >
> > best regards
> >
> >   Olav Kvittem
> >
> >
> > >From the Rude/Crude log :
> >
> > ID=2 SEQ=1087254 SRC=129.242.2.140:3002 DST=158.39.3.57:10001
> > Tx=1488765681.242718 Rx=1488765681.254802 SIZE=64
> > ID=2 SEQ=413544 SRC=129.242.2.140:3002 DST=158.39.3.57:10001
> > Tx=1488758944.142720 Rx=1488765681.260987 SIZE=64
> > ID=2 SEQ=1087255 SRC=129.242.2.140:3002 DST=158.39.3.57:10001
> > Tx=1488765681.252718 Rx=1488765681.264785 SIZE=64
> >
> > Tx, RX is Unix time for transmit and receive respectively
> >
> >
> > RFC 1918 :
> >
> > 5.3.1 Time to Live (TTL)
> >
> >    The Time-to-Live (TTL) field of the IP header is defined to be a
> >    timer limiting the lifetime of a datagram.  It is an 8-bit field and
> >    the units are seconds.  Each router (or other module) that handles a
> >    packet MUST decrement the TTL by at least one, even if the elapsed
> >    time was much less than a second.  Since this is very often the case,
> >    the TTL is effectively a hop count limit on how far a datagram can
> >    propagate through the Internet.
> >
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> >
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